Being a literate gay man, I'm used to being treated like a sex-starved moron by publishers, but you might not be. You might pick up Now Is the Hour, note the high-quality imprint and high price, and forgivably think you were purchasing something of literary merit. Please allow me to disabuse you.

In its woeful current state, gay literature (or at least gay male literature) tends to fall into three, ahem, camps. One, the frothy romp through catty jokes and queeny friends. Two, the Lolita reversal, of which the apex is Alan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star, where a godlike teenage boy has lots of graphic sex with a shlumpy, middle-aged writer. Yeah, that happens. And three, the moist gay bildungsroman, in which some poor soul overcomes obstacles on his way out of the closet to become a better, more honest human being with lots of orgasms.

Now Is the Hour is the third type, with orgasms aplenty. The plot, if I must, begins with Rigby John Klusener hitchhiking to San Francisco in 1967 from rural Idaho, wearing flowers in his hair. The novel is the story of how he got there, including a devout Catholic upbringing on his parents' farm, skinny-dipping with handsome Mexican labourers, falling in deep platonic love with rebel girl Billie Cody, and finally falling in actual love with 35-year-old alcoholic Native American George Serrano, who likes dressing up as a woman but who nevertheless is hired by Rigby John's racist, homophobic father to work solo with his "spineless ass" son. Yes, okay, sure.

This is all told in a flood of Oprah-ready sunny aphorisms ("Miracles are out there somewhere. You just got to find them"), and most grandly emotional scenes end with the participants collapsing in laughter at something funny the reader's missed. There are fantastically improbable and melodramatic deaths, an excruciating appropriation of pseudo-Native American myth, and three whole pages of Rigby John saying goodbye to his dog.

So the question is, why would such juvenile, navel-gazing nonsense be served up as "a triumphant return by one of America's finest novelists"? I can only conclude that it's to do with the novel's "queerness", its explicit sexuality blinding otherwise intelligent people to its manifest shortcomings.

There are, of course, excellent gay male writers out there. Colm Tóibín, Patrick Gale, the brilliant Allan Gurganus, though they're all such far-reaching authors that to call them simply "gay writers" is almost an insulting limitation. And, too, let me say - not for the first time - thank God for lesbians. Give me a Sarah Waters, an Ali Smith, a Jackie Kay any day over the Tom Spanbauers of the world; give me any writer who sees sexuality as the first step rather than the entire journey.

Coincidentally, I saw Tony Kushner's seven-hour play Angels In America just before I finished reading Now Is the Hour. Subtitled "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes", it truly is an operatic meditation on life and politics, gay to its core but using that as a prism to refashion the world, to create things anew, to dare to aim for transcendence. Now Is the Hour is little more than "A Gay Fantasia on My Penis". I'm not angry that it's overtly gay, I'm not angry that it's explicitly sexual (Angels in America is both). I'm angry that it leaves me resolutely unenlightened, that it shows me not one fresh thing about the world or my life, and that we're being asked to pay £17.99 for the privilege of being told this is literature.

· Patrick Ness's Things About Which I Know Nothing is published by Harper Perennial